Ondsel Blog

Part of the problem GIMP has is that they chase perfect ideas at the expense of good ones.

Adobe don't. The Adobe codebase is cruft that has taken a similarly long time to shake out. Lightroom was seemingly built like a skunkworks project almost like a desktop webapp (scripting around a core renderer, SQLite, simpler mode-oriented GUI) to avoid the intransigence and friction of Photoshop's codebase.

But this is what GIMP is up against. Cruft that earns money, that is driving not just what users want but how they think about what they want.

For GIMP to be more successful it doesn't need live non-global filters like blurs, but it would have been enormously beneficial to the project if it had global adjustment layers, say, 15 years ago.

Then youtube would have been filled with tutorials, there would have been momentum around the project, some commercial support interest, etc.

Kicking the can down the road has consequences. This great Ondsel blog article about how difficult it is to merge major changes into an open source project goes into it in some detail:

https://ondsel.com/blog/freecad-topological-naming/

Some decisions need to be taken at the right time; if you don't, you need a whole separate kind of energy to get them done without stopping everyone else.

(The successful Affinity suite is a result of taking some right decisions back in 2010 or 2011)

If anyone is curious I started a discussion forum [1] with the goal of researching possible paths to good quality open source CAD, after an off-hand tweet of mine about open source CAD got significant traction on twitter.

Based on what I know so far, it seems that FreeCAD might be finally getting the investment it needs to mature as a real option. There is an organization called Ondsel which is taking on a lot of UI and assembly bench improvements, and I have heard that their preview versions are worth checking out. [2]

Notably, the big question about open source CAD relates to the geometry kernel used. They take decades to produce, and only OpenCASCADE is even remotely mature enough. OpenCASCADE is also somewhat tricky to work with, but it seems to be our only choice. Even if we had millions of dollars of investment in open source CAD it seems unlikely we could do better than OpenCASCADE based on what I have learned.

So my next step when I get some time is to explore how the Ondsel branch of FreeCAD is going and see if I can convince myself this is the path we should all be supporting. I do see no other paths currently, so my hope is that we see FreeCAD mature enough that it becomes usable by professional mechanical engineers.

[1] https://github.com/tlalexander/open-cad-foundation/discussions

[2] https://ondsel.com/download/

FreeCAD has improved immensely over the past 2-3 years in terms of stability and features. A decade ago it was not uncommon for me to experience crashes from it randomly losing its GLX context or the constraint solver segfaulting for some reason. Now it's rare for it to crash at all for me, though I still run into a lot of constraint solver errors that are a pain to deal with.

However, despite the recent improvements, I still cannot recommend it for new users compared to commercial solutions for the sole reason of the Topological Naming Issues: https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem

This issue has been probably the #1 problem I've had with FreeCAD since I started using it. And though I've learned how to design parts to get around the problem in most situations, it's a huge hurdle for newcomers to understand and get around. Luckily there's a fork that fixes a significant number of the issues: https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD_assembly3 and https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD

I've also heard of Ondsel, which is supposedly a much more user friendly version of FreeCAD that also includes some fixes to the issue: https://ondsel.com/

EDIT: Here's actually a better read of the topological naming issue, what's being done about it, and why it's difficult to fix: https://ondsel.com/blog/freecad-topological-naming/

No, it's not, not really -- because the UX work going into Ondsel is going into mainstream FreeCAD (if it didn't originate there, and a lot of recent work did).

I am sure Ondsel will vary somewhat in UX over time (because they will be somewhat ahead of what they upstream) and because a few things may be unavailable for open-source licensing.

But most of what has changed in terms of UX is already in 0.22-dev. For example OpenTheme will work (don't know if it is included by default), the "glass" tree overlay from RealThunder is there, the overlay panels, the sketcher improvements, the new integrated Assembly workbench etc.

Ondsel is a commercial distribution of FreeCAD with a cloud-based engineering suite integrated -- file sharing, cloud compute (for parametric recalculations and STEP export) etc.

Here is how they describe themselves -- in some useful detail:

https://ondsel.com/handbook/About/about_ondsel/

Sorry. this isn't correct at all. FreeCAD development is very active and it's getting better every day. I'm using the developer versions because, there are just so many improvements happening to UI and usability. Its development process has also improved a lot since a commercial entity (ondsel.com), run by an active FreeCAD developer. started helping. Just checkout the latest release notes for 0.21, 0.22 and 1.0 if you haven't tried it for a while (sections for PartDesign and Sketcher workspaces are the most relevant, if you just want to design for e.g. 3D printing). https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.0

Eventhough I will only use the upstream FLOSS version, I often refer people to https://ondsel.com/blog/ for an extensive summary of everything happening around FreeCAD.

I also like SolveSpace a lot. I use it to design small things all the time. Tiny single file program, very responsive interface. It's also pretty intuitive (if you're already familiar with CAD constraints and parametric modelling concepts). There was a burst of activity 2-3 years ago so I was hopeful we'd get filets and maybe better error messages but it hasn't happened yet.

Ondsel is also increasingly good. They've released a new version recently: https://ondsel.com/blog/ondsel-es-2024-2/

Their website login-wall downloads for whatever reason, so go to github: https://github.com/Ondsel-Development/FreeCAD/releases